Europe’s Palestine divide: Politicians target their own people for protesting

After over 21 months of live-streamed killings in Gaza that leading experts have unanimously called a genocide, even European politicians had begun to feebly question Israel’s inhumane offensive.

However, Israel’s “pre-emptive” strikes on Iran last month, which led to a 12-day war, tautly pulled European politicians back into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s embrace.

Rehearsed statements about European values and Israel’s “right to exist” were pronounced immediately, delivered with the smug and bureaucratic indifference perhaps most easily identified with the European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen.

To these proceedings, the German Chancellor, Frederic Merz, added some blunt intensity when he commended Israel for doing the West’s drecksarbeit or “dirty work”. This “dirty work”, since October 7, 2023, has ostensibly included over 35,000 attacks across five countries, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

Some weeks earlier, in a press conference with US President Donald Trump where the American leader was uncharacteristically better behaved than usual, Merz had asserted that he saw the defeat of the Nazis as a liberation of Germany. Meanwhile, he has repeatedly blamed the rise in antisemitism in Germany on immigrants.

Put together, these statements from the leader of Europe’s largest country signify a stunning re-wiring of historical memory in which, first, Germany becomes a victim of both the Nazis and antisemitism and second,...

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